Archie Green: Champion of Folklore of the Working Class

Posted on April 6, 2009

It’s rare for an academic to pioneer one field of study as well as chart and define its boundaries. Archie Green did that in three fields – traditional music, labor history and the culture and traditions of work, and public folklore.

For five decades, Green was a pioneer in the study of working-class language, vernacular music and art, and what he called “laborlore,” the special folklore of workers.

Green died March 22 in San Francisco. He was 91.

“He was interested in all things,” said Patrick Huber ’00 (PhD), an associate professor of history at Missouri University of Science and Technology. “He had a way of inspiring people and motivating people. He would bring people together and then leave them to their collaboration. And he had a way of convincing you that what he was saying was the truth.”

After graduating from the University of California-Berkeley in 1939, Green joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and worked as a road builder and firefighter. His love for UNC began when he came across Social Forces, a journal put out by UNC sociology Professor Howard W. Odum, and read Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. He was a shipbuilder and carpenter before returning to school at age 42 to earn a master’s and a doctorate. He taught at universities in Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky and Texas.

Green promoted the idea of public folklore – folklorists working outside the academic world – and worked for nearly six years to create a national folklife center, which became a reality when Congress passed the American Folklife Preservation Act in January 1976. He was one of the foremost scholars on the songs of the American working class.

He established an archive for his collected materials in the Southern Folklife Collection at UNC in the 1980s and helped UNC acquire a major collection of early country music that now forms the core of UNC’s Southern Folklife Collection. He started a fund to help maintain that collection, and he donated his own collection of rare labor songbooks, union materials, recordings and manuscripts.

In 1988, Green and his wife, Louanne, established the Archie Green Fund for Occupational Folklife Studies at UNC. The endowed fund’s income supports the Archie Green Occupational Folklife Graduate Fellowship.

UNC presented an honorary doctorate to Green in 1991 in recognition of his stature as a folklorist and in honor of his efforts to build the Folklife Collection and endow the Archie Green fund.

– Don Evans ’80

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